It was a crucial Wednesday morning, and it was my audit day. I was teaching Venn Diagrams and Set Operations to my Grade 11 class, a foundational concept that often trips students up. I knew the observer was taking notes on the back row, silently recording how I handled both the content and any unexpected disruptions.To make it dynamic and precise, I was using GeoGebra—students loved the interactive feature that allowed them to drag sets and clearly see the shaded areas for complex operations like (AUB 

The lesson was flowing beautifully. I was just about to have the next group come up and use the digital pen to shade a new operation… when the board display decided to stage a rebellion. The entire screen started to jump, flicker, and shake. It wasn’t a slow crash; it was a violent digital seizure. The GeoGebra interface flashed wildly, making any interaction impossible. Technology had failed spectacularly at the absolute worst time.

I was about to pivot to a simple lecture when one of my students, bless her soul, raised her hand. “Ma’am,” she suggested candidly, “can we just do this the old way? The groups can draw the diagrams themselves.”

That was it-Plan B- spontaneous, collaborative, and student-driven.

I quickly divided the whiteboard into four quadrants and assigned each of the four student groups a challenging operation. They grabbed different colored markers and, one group at a time, rushed to their assigned quadrant. The air shifted from quiet anxiety to vibrant, focused chaos. Each group had to verbally explain their shading process—why they included that section and why they excluded another—while the rest of the class debated their logic.

The level of ownership and mathematical discourse was higher than it had been with the smooth software. By the end of the lesson, the whiteboard was a beautiful, messy tapestry of four distinct, correctly shaded Venn diagrams, all explained with confidence. The observer noted it as an exemplary display of flexible teaching and maximizing student voice under pressure. I realized then that the failure of technology was, ironically, the greatest success of the day.

ASHA REGHUNANDANAN